Posted: Sun May 15, 2011 11:38 am Post subject: Can I Boot from the Slave HD?

A few months ago my older HP Pavilion started having hardware problems. The PC would seem to sleep for no reason. The frequency became so close, that the PC would no longer fully boot. So I took the hard drive out and added it as a slave to my newer HP machine. Both PC’s are XP with the newer being Professional.

Everything is working great in that I can access my files on what is now my J: drive.

My question is; can I boot the PC from the J drive? I would sometimes like to run my old PC. It would be nice if I could have a choice of drives to boot from.

It is not possible to boot from an external drive, and even if it was you can't use Windows on a different machine to which it was installed - due to differences in hardware.

The only option is to install the harddrive into another PC, and then booth from an actual Windows XP CD (the same version of XP as you have installed on the harddrive) and do a repair install. There are lots of guides on how do this on the net- just do a Google search.